A developer is converting the former Holyoke House hotel at Suffolk and Maple streets, seen above in 2009, into market-rate apartments and retail spaces with help from the Holyoke Spark program.
(FILE PHOTO)

Updated at 2:53 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 1, 2015 to clarify that the Spark program is unique to Holyoke while other cities under the Working Cities Challenge led by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston have programs with other focuses.

HOLYOKE -- Eric Taub is renovating into apartments and retail spaces the building that used to be called "Holyoke House" and the "Roger Smith Hotel" at Maple and Suffolk streets, and he recommends Holyoke Spark.

"It's like a 101 course in entrepreneurship," Taub said Wednesday (Sept. 30).

Taub is among those who recently completed a nine-week course provided by the Stimulating Potential, Accessing Resource Knowledge -- SPARK -- program, a state- and federally-funded program where he learned about dealing with insurance companies, lawyers and city permitting.

The purpose of the Spark program is to help prospective owners establish business plans and figure out how to get operating. Holyoke Spark recently received an additional $56,000 from the Massachusetts Growth Capital Corp., a quasi-public agency that helps small businesses, said Tessa Murphy-Romboletti, development specialist with the city Department of Planning and Economic Development.

"This award will allow SPARK to offer more classes, provide one-on-one mentoring for entrepreneurs and support a micro-enterprise loan program for those who qualify," Murphy-Romboletti said.

The additional funding comes after Holyoke Spark received $250,000 from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston last year and $75,000 from the city's share of the federal Community Development Block Grant this year, she said.

Such programs are part of a larger program in the state known as Working Cities Challenge led by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Partners in Holyoke Spark are the Greater Holyoke Chamber of Commerce, the Holyoke Public Library, Holyoke Community College, Easthampton Savings Bank, Holyoke Works, a job training and education program affiliated with the Holyoke Chamber, and Nuestras Raices. Nuestras Raices -- "Our roots" -- is a nonprofit group that seeks to promote economic, human, and community development in Holyoke through projects relating to food, agriculture and the environment.

Taub, 28, who said he was born in New York and raised in Argentina, is renovating the former Holyoke House into 90 or so market-rate apartments and eight to 10 retail spaces. He hopes to have some of the living and work spaces ready in early 2016, he said in a phone interview.

Holyoke Spark helped him envision his plan for not only residential and retail at the former Holyoke House, but a structure that would have a doorman, ballroom, roof-top balcony and pool, he said.

"It helps you think through what you need," Taub said.

To be eligible to participate in the Working Cities Challenge, so-called working cities are defined as those with a population exceeding 35,000 (excluding Boston) whose median family income is below the median family income statewide and whose poverty rate is above the statewide poverty rate.

Holyoke's population as of 2013 was 40,249. The median household income in Massachusetts from 2009 to 2013 was $66,866 while Holyoke's was $31,628, the U.S. Census Bureau said.

From 2009 to 2013, Holyoke had 31.5 percent of its population living in poverty compared to 11.4 percent statewide, the U.S. Census Bureau said.

Other cities involved in the Working Cities Challenge -- though not specifically the Spark entrepreneurship, which is unique to Holyoke -- include Lawrence, with a focus on working families to increase parents' income, and Chelsea, to reduce poverty in the Shurtleff-Bellingham neighborhood, for example, according to bostonfed.org.

Holyoke Spark is part of what Marcos A. Marrero, director of the Department of Planning and Economic Development, called the city's "economic trajectory."

"The Spark partnership has created a new mechanism to develop the home-grown talent of Holyoke residents and help turn their skills into careers and new businesses. We look forward to seeing these seeds flourish," Marrero said, in a press release from Murphy-Romboletti.

Farid Khelfaoui, Holyoke Spark executive director, said the curriculum offers not just classes but chances for locals with business ideas to connect.

"Start-ups face similar, frustrating challenges and hearing how they've each resolved them in different scenarios help them become better at their business," Khelfaoui said in the press release.